Mark H. Moore, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management and Director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations

The mission of the Hauser Center, like most research centers at the University, includes both teaching and research and practitioner engagement—we think of these as closely interrelated activities. An important part of the Hauser Center was to essentially try to focus our attention on the practice community at least as much on the academic community that was trying to develop this as a field.

This turns out to be particularly difficult in the non-profit sector because the organizations—there’s zillions of them—they’re very heterogeneous, but within the heterogeneity is a large number of very interesting organizations which are very small, and they’re both in this country and around the world. We have going in a sense that we would like to be in touch with these organizations, both to help them and for them to help us, and so I think from the beginning we understood that we were going to need some kind of new technological base to help us accomplish… to be as ambitious as we wanted to be in that particular agenda.

We have made an effort at, but we haven’t figured out how to use very successfully yet, technology to support executive development programs. We have found ourselves moving into industry and company-specific executive programs, and we’ve also been finding ourselves trying to leverage and have a bigger impact on the lives of the people who attend our executive programs. We know that we can have people come and have a good educational experience here, and say it was wonderful, and that it changed their lives, and stuff like that; but whether it really changed their lives and then, more importantly, whether it changed the organizations that they’re a part of, is a whole other question. You might want to change the program so they come and meet one another face-to-face, get an exposure, get some training, but then go out and work on projects, and where we stay in touch with them through technology while they work on their projects, and then we can find out whether our concepts work, and they can find out more about their organizations than they knew in advance of that, and stuff like that. So we have this picture of a way in which our executive development programs could reach for a bigger impact on the individuals in our executive programs and the organizations that send them by sustaining the relationship with the people over time and across space, and again technology would be required to do that.

The particular results that I would be trying to get out of the, in some sense, technology-enhanced executive education—if we wanted to call it that—would be a bigger impact on the lives of the people that came here and a bigger impact on the organizations that they are trying to lead and manage. We have the sense that an awful lot of the knowledge about how to construct these organizations and make them effective is in the practice field, not in the academy, so we’ve been wondering then how to tap into the knowledge of the practice community, to take latent knowledge that’s held out there in the world and to make it explicit and testable and sharable in a variety of different ways about how to do these pieces of work. We call this a learning community, and, again, we imagine that technology might be helpful in that.

What the original idea was, is that we could actually find examples of learning communities in the world that had worked off of technology. The idea was that we would find the people who had done this successfully and ask them to tell us what they had done—that seemed to work. And we discovered that it was hard to find learning communities of the type that we were interested in that had actually been working successfully. I began making this distinction in my mind between electronically based sites that held lots of information, which I thought of as the functional equivalent of encyclopedias, though much bigger. The second was what you might think of as the broadcast mode which is: we have a wonderful idea so now lets spread it over the world and make it powerful and compelling and all that sort of stuff. But then the third opportunity was dialogic mode. And I was really impressed actually by an experiment that we ran on distance learning in which we tried a variety of different things—we tried a televised lecture, a lot of different things—but the one thing that I thought was the most interesting was essentially a two-way asynchronous text communication or email around a case and my experience of it was that it was like a very slow case study class, a very slow and very precise case study class. A student would write back a whole paragraph, and if that happens in class you can’t parse that paragraph without being incredibly rude and incredibly tedious so it appears as an unanalyzable thought that just hangs there in the air and has to be dealt with as a thing; but once you have it on an email, you can carve it up and say, well this is the point at which I began disagreeing. So there’s a kind of precision there that’s missing in ordinary speech. You lose some of the emotional energy, but you get in exchange for that a kind of capacity to think and reflect before you respond.

The way that I find it most helpful to think about this is to start with those functions that my research center has to perform, and then to work out from our traditional ways of doing that to see the way in which technology could support it. Think of a teaching hospital for a moment: it could become a virtual teaching hospital—both a place where you send interns out and then where you had discussions with one another about how you were solving particular kinds of problems that were showing up.